The day-to-day experience of many knowledge workers typically consists of exposure to a number of computers. For example, a user may have a main office machine, a mobile machine (such as a laptop or PDA), a home machine, and the occasional foreign machines (e.g., airport kiosks, conference room PC, other user machines). Despite the fact that the same person may be using each of these machines, the machines themselves are ignorant of the each other.
In some situations, the user may wish to interact with multiple computers in a manner such that work created on one machine can be transmitted to another machine without requiring traditional data transfer mechanisms (e.g., portable storage devices such as drives or memory, or email) or an explicit copy step. For example, a user may wish to show a co-worker a word processing document in progress.
In other situations, a user may wish to interact with multiple computers to provide the user with access to various input and output devices at the same time, even if they are associated with different computers. For example, the user may wish to display a presentation on a conference room computer by manipulating a laptop or handheld portable computing device, e.g., PDA.